 From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. Hello everybody, welcome back to the Tavern on the Green. We're here in the heart of Central Park in New York City. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, big events, small events. We're here at the Veritas Solution Days, hashtag Vitas Vision. Veritas Vision used to be a very large, big tent conference. They've changed the format now, and they go out, they're going up to 20 cities this year, belly to belly with the customers, and we've got one here, Vishal Kedekia, who is the data protection manager at NBC Universal. Vishal, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. No problem, thank you for having me. So as I say, we love to get the customer perspectives, but let me start with this event. Why, you're a busy person, you're managing a lot of data. Why do you take time out to come to an event like this? What do you learn? You always get to learn new stuff, new products that you don't necessarily get to learn, because you're always just zoned in into your day-to-day work that you're doing, so you don't always get to see what the new features may be, or you miss it, so these types of events are generally good to come to see that. So what's the day in the life like these days for data protection management, and really I'm interested in how it's changed over the last five or six years, as you see things like the buzzwords, digital transformation, big data, cloud, multi-cloud, all the vendor buzzwords, but you actually have to live that. So how has that changed the role of data protection and data protection manager specifically? It's definitely a lot more complicated. Before, you were just backing up on-prem, you had tape, pretty much made it simple. Now you have all these different workloads, you're sending out to clouds, multi-tenant, as they keep calling it, the hybrid, which is another buzzword. Trying to manage the different workloads is a lot more complex than it was five years ago. You have various cloud vendors, you have various storage vendors, so managing all of that, obviously the data growth from the smaller backups to now, big data, which can be terabytes, petabytes, to try to back that up has been a bit of a challenge. Well, that's a challenge for someone like you who's, I mean, RPO and RTO is not getting relaxed, right? And people always talk about getting my weekends back, but now you have to keep up with all these other technologies. So what is it? Is it a lot of reading? Is it just going to sessions like this, having vendors come in? How do you keep up with it all? I think it's a big mix of both. It's going out to these events, but also having vendors come to you doing your own research, so it's a combination of just constantly keeping up. So I would say it's a combination of all. One of the things that I would be concerned about in your role is to have just more stovepipes. Are you able to, just conceptually, not technical, deep technical anyway, I love tech, but are you able to create, let's call it an abstraction layer for your data protection, is that kind of your vision and where you're headed so that you don't have to have 10 different formats and methodologies and processes around data protection? Yeah, I think that's the goal that I think every company's trying to go to is consolidate, simplify, whether that's vendor, whether there's hardware. I think that's really the goal of any organization now, and that's kind of where we're headed also. So if it's a baseball game analogy in your nine inning game, where are you in terms of that journey? Are you, is it early days, kind of first inning? Are you kind of warming up in the bullpen? Are you sort of well into the game? I think we're well into the game. We're probably into the middle innings, I would say. Okay, so you can see that vision becoming a reality. And what are the priorities then in terms of getting to that point? Is it skill sets? Is it technology? Is it people? I would say it's technology. I would say that consolidation is probably the big word. We're all trying to consolidate while trying to back up the large data sets, right? And I think that's where we are right now, is that's where we're starting to get to and see the plan forming, seeing where our methodologies or strategies on how we're going to go forward. As you move toward the cloud, Vishal, whether or not it's even pushing data to the cloud, a lot of times you just can't. But it seems like that cloud operating model is something that's alluring to folks. Simplifying, agility, self-service. Are those initiatives that you guys have enacted? In terms of that, yeah, we're, I think in that phase, I think we're in our beginning to form that plan because once you get to the cloud, you have to really have a good plan. Otherwise, your data's going to be all over the place. You're not going to know where it is. And managing that's just going to become that much harder. So I think in terms of that, we're trying to really come up with a good plan of how you migrate to the cloud. Because once you get to the cloud, there's a whole different set of complexities that you have in managing it. Like what, maybe check off a few so we can paint a picture. So once you get to the cloud, migrating, so you've formulated your plan how to get to, what cloud to use, what vendor to use. How do you migrate from your on-prem to the cloud is I think one of the big complexities which I think kind of stumped a lot of people. You want to go to the cloud, just don't know how to get there. Is that because the volume of data and you got to move data and it just takes so long? I mean, the backup your iPhone takes forever and it fails left and right. Yeah, absolutely. So okay, so it's the amount of data and the time it takes. Right, and you also have legacy applications which may not be cloud-ready and then how do you deal with that? So you have that hybrid model, you still want to keep some stuff on-prem but you want to go to the cloud, what goes to the cloud, which cloud do you go to? All of that is where I think we're really at and I don't think it's any different than any other organization, right? So that's kind of where we're at. And how about this notion of multi-cloud? I mean, is that something that is real in your business? Yeah, I think it definitely is. I think our end users are trying to take advantage of where to go best. Some places Azure might work best, some places AWS might work. There's also Google now that's coming up. So I think you have to kind of consider where the workload would be best to go to. Is shadow sort of IT and cloud creep problematic for you? In other words, in the lines of business, saying, it's easy, I can swipe a credit card and I'm up and running in minutes and then, oh, I got to protect this data. It's got to be compliant. Has that been a challenge for you? Do you feel like you have that under control? No, that has definitely been a challenge. There's a lot of different groups that have kind of tried to do their own thing and then found out, oh wait, this is way harder than we thought. Let us go back to our central team, but by then it's kind of all over the place, right? So that's definitely been a challenge. Yeah, it's hard because thinking about that, you probably might have done it differently. You might have put in processes and procedures in place and now you got to clean up the mess, so to speak. But okay, so I want to get into Veritas and you're a Veritas customer. I am. So how does Veritas help you with all these solutions? I mean, a lot of things that I've just asked you, I think are part of either their roadmap or they're making claims that they can currently help solve some of these problems. Can they, what do you do with Veritas and how legitimate is their ability in terms of able to solve some of these problems? Yeah, so I mean, we've been able to use Veritas as a central location, management of everything. One of their tools is such as CloudPoint. So our biggest thing is, if you don't have a central management tool like CloudPoint, which can manage your various cloud backups, then you're left with managing each cloud on its own. So as an operations standpoint, that's like a nightmare. So having a tool such as CloudPoint, and then that can integrate it back into NetBackup, which now gives us a central location for all my backups, for reporting, for audit purposes, any of that has been great. And I've been using Veritas since 3.1. So I've been a Veritas customer for a long time. I've seen the evolution of when it was 3.1, a lot of it was manually operated, a lot of scripts, where now a lot of it is automated. So that's helped a lot. We're automating VM policies. We're automating SQL backup policies. All of that has been great. Where are you today in terms of the release? I'm sorry? Where are you at today in terms of the release? I know they just released 8.1.2, we're on 8.1.1. Okay, so close to current. Yeah, I've seen some videos on 8.1.2. It looks like they've really put a lot of time and effort into refreshing it. It looks like a microservices architecture. They're talking about containers, certainly saying all the right things. From your perspective, have you dug into it yet or is it still early? It's still early. I did deploy it on a test environment. I haven't fully played around with it. But some of the cool concepts obviously are you're going away from that Java console eventually, getting to that web base. Able to access it from anywhere. The manageability, like a central tool to manage all of that, I think they're finally gearing towards that. And you guys are a VMware shop. We are a VMware shop. We were at VMworld last August, this past year and even the year before, data protection was one of the hottest topics on the show floor. Were you there? I was not there. It was really a lot of buzz there and a lot of new entrants in that space and I would imagine a lot of people coming after you for your business because this is a very large install base. So when you look at the vendor landscape, how do you look at it? Where do you position Veritas relative to some of the other upstarts? Your thoughts on the competitive landscape? Why Veritas? Well, my point of view has always been if it's not broke, you don't fix it. There may be other that may be doing something better but at the end of the day, if it's not drastically different, it's a lot of work to move away from one product to another. They'll always come to you and say, hey, we do this better, we do this better. Then when you compare it to me, Veritas is at all-encompassing. It doesn't only do virtual, does physical well also. It doesn't only do big data, it does all the traditional databases as well. They're always constantly evolving and adding new workloads that it can also be compatible with. Yeah, so I would imagine it would be a little difficult to go to your CFO and try to justify a huge migration project given the other priorities that you have. But I mean, give me some insight there. I mean, what kinds of things do you want to focus on? I mean, obviously, nobody wants to migrate anything. It's like moving a house. You really don't want to do it. I mean, sometimes you get a bigger house or a nicer house or a smaller house, but moving is always a pain. And so, you'd rather put your effort in your shop somewhere else. Where are you putting that effort? What are some of the priorities that you have, either personally or professionally? Well, I would say in this sense, I think it's, I don't want to work the weekends, right? So, how do we automate? How do we make operations easier for everybody? The engineering, the solution, the operations, we want to make it simple. I think Veritas allows us to do that because they're an open source. They work with many vendors, which makes it nice, right? So you can, such as VMware, we can, it works with VRealize, all those plugins with VMware and you can eventually just automate and make it simple. Yeah, and kind of get rid of a lot of the scripts, which tend to be fragile. They take a lot of maintenance. They tend to be error-prone. So if you can, through a set of APIs, automate programmatically, move toward sort of infrastructure as code or a DevOps environment, I'm sure you guys are doing that internally. And what a difference it makes from the sort of classic waterfall in terms of speed, agility, quality. I presume you're seeing that in your shop. Yeah, we definitely are. And something like a flex appliance would allow us to move towards that, right? It simplifies, gets us to where we are, but also helps us with our goals of simplifying, reducing our footprint, but still being able to be agile enough to go to cloud, to keep a hybrid model. So something like that is, I think, where we're seeing. Well, Vishal, we love the customer perspective. Thank you for coming on. We'd like to hear the truth, Veritas, truth in Latin, of course, and really appreciate your time. Thank you very much. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We're here at Vitas Vision, hashtag Vitas Vision, Veritas Vision Days in New York City, Central Park, Tavern on the Green, beautiful location. My name's Dave Vellante. We'll be right back right after this short break.